2. They’re Cheap

When Stanley interviewed the wealthy, they didn’t want them to feel uncomfortable.

So they rented a penthouse in Manhattan, loaded it with four types of pâté, three kinds of caviar and plenty of fine wine.

The millionaires arrived… and felt completely out of place. All they ate were the gourmet crackers.

When offered the fancy wine one interviewee said he only drank two types of beer: free and Budweiser.

The researchers were stunned. They quickly realised the media images we see of millionaires aren’t representative.

Expect a millionaire to be a fancy dresser? 50% have never paid over £250 for a suit. (10% had never paid £150.)

In fact, if you do see someone wearing a £600 suit, it’s more likely they’re not a millionaire.

Stanley writes in The Millionaire Mind, "For every millionaire who owns a £600 suit, there are at least six owners who have annual incomes in the £30,000 to £125,000 range but who are not millionaires."

Fancy car? More than half have never paid over £18,000 for a car. See someone in a Mercedes? They are probably not a millionaire.

Stanley and Danko, in Millionaire Next Door, write, " …approximately 70,000 Mercedes were sold in this country last year. This translates into about one-half of 1 percent of the more than fourteen million motor vehicles sold. At the same time, there were nearly 3.5 million millionaire households. What does this tell us? It suggests that the members of most wealthy households don’t drive luxury imports. The fact is that two out of three purchasers or leasers of foreign luxury motor vehicles in this country are not millionaires.

Most millionaires live a lot more like you and me than Jay Z, Elon Musk or Donald Trump.

They’re thrifty, not very materialistic, and they think a great deal about how much they spend.

They continue, "There is an inverse relationship between the time spent purchasing luxury items such as cars and clothes and the time spent planning one’s financial future."

And the more materialistic people are, the less satisfied they are with their lives.

In his book 100 Simple Secrets of the Best Half of Life, Dr. David Niven writes, "Among participants in one study, those whose values were the most materialistic rated their lives as the least satisfying, according to a 2001 study."